Waiting, Women & Speech

Beautiful was the sight--beautiful weather, beautiful and many women, beautiful flowers and greens about the rostrum at one end of Stanford's beautiful football stadium wherein California ,last week heard the first campaign speech of its first Presidential Nominee. There was no Sidewalks-of-New York thronging. Twenty thousand automobiles were parked on Leland Stanford grounds. An ultimate total of about 70,000, mostly women, came leisurely into the stadium.

First to the microphone (107 stations, unknown millions of instruments atune) went California's Governor. He told the world New Hampshire's Senator Moses would talk next, and the smart-cracking Senator told, without smart-cracks, that the Republicans would elect Hoover whom they had nominated and who would now acknowledge his nomination. . . .

Long days, the Beaver Man had waited for this sunny moment. For most of a month he had been at his home on a nearby hill. There had not been the least echo of a murmur of excitement, except for newsmen pitching horseshoes nearby. The Beaver Man's chief companion had been Assistant U. S. Attorney General William J. Donovan. This Donovan, "Wild Bill," is a man of desire and passion and reckless courage but even he seemed to walk more gently in the sun and quiet.*

Of course, dozens of others came to that quiet house, bursting, usually, with optimism. They bored the Beaver Man; so much so, that he invented excuses to avoid them, as for example taking Senator Moses to practice before the Stadium microphone, a Senator who required microphone practice "as much as an oyster needs a Maxim silencer."

The Beaver Man himself had done endless practicing. He had practiced for talking movies, which were sped Eastward. He had gone to the Stadium and read aloud a yellow clipping about the first telephone. He knew his speech almost literally backward. More important, it was agreed that his voice and manner are as good for radio purposes as they are bad for the auditorium.

Also, in this waiting time, Mr. Hoover had written another speech, about farms, to be given at his birthplace, West Branch, Iowa.

Also, he had his 54th Birthday, excitement-less, save for a postcard from Calvin Coolidge, four feet square. But, essentially, he just waited. He did so purposely. He was saving his "fireworks" for October. Said Senator Moses: "Again, the Democrats are winning in August; again, they will lose in November."

* Son of red-haired Irish Tim of Buffalo, there had been a day in France when, in the full regalia of Colonel, and flashing his automatic he had bellowed: "Come on! They can't hit me and they won't hit you. Let's go." The men he thus summoned at the battle near Landres and St. Georges, he had made iron by drilling them to fight each other naked to the waist and to run miles in bare feet. A poet, Joyce Kilmer, had followed him jubilantly unto death. "Hard boiled" they called him and terribly "Wild."